The End of the World in Medieval Thought and Spirituality

Eric Knibbs, Jessica A. Boon, Erica Gelser, Eric Knibbs, Jessica A. Boon, Erica Gelser

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9783030149659
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Medieval & Early Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This essay collection studies the Apocalypse and the end of the world, as these themes occupied the minds of biblical scholars, theologians, and ordinary people in Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and Early Modernity. It opens with an innovative series of studies on "Gendering the Apocalypse, " devoted to the texts and contexts of the apocalyptic through the lens of gender. A second section of essays studies the more traditional problem of "Apocalyptic Theory and Exegesis, " with a focus on authors such as Augustine of Hippo and Joachim of Fiore. A final series of essays extends the thematic scope to "The Eschaton in Political, Liturgical, and Literary Contexts." In these essays, scholars of history, theology, and literature create a dialogue that considers how fear of the end of the world, among the most pervasive emotions in human experience, underlies a great part of Western cultural production.

© The Author(s) 2019

Eric Knibbs, Jessica A. Boon and Erica Gelser (eds.)The End of the World in Medieval Thought and SpiritualityThe New Middle Ageshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14965-9_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Jessica A. Boon¹ and Eric Knibbs²

(1)

University of North Carolina—Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA

(2)

Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Munich, Germany

Jessica A. Boon (Corresponding author)

Eric Knibbs

End Abstract

Fear of the end of time—for all the world or for oneself—is perhaps the most pervasive emotion in human experience. It powers much of religious thought, as the idea of death or concern that the world as we know it will come to a precipitous end has led countless numbers to scour their scriptures, seek counsel from their religious leaders, undertake complex rituals and journeys, meditate on their sins, and change their ways. Within Christian thought, this type of fear is broadly eschatological (Last Things) and more specifically apocalyptic, insofar as commentaries on the book of Revelation, visions of the endtimes, prophecies, and millenarian speculation all provide possible answers to or amelioration of terror induced by plague, war, sickness, accidents, and self-reflection on the sinful nature of humanity.¹ Yet these potential avenues of hope can sometimes lead to a vicious cycle, when the answers provided by the apocalyptic to eschatological fears are so obscure or threatening as to spark more fear than they relieve.²

The apocalypse and the apocalyptic were central to premodern Christian discourse. From biblical exegesis to mysticism, from crusade ideology to Marian beliefs that identify her as the Woman of the Sun, from theology to poetry to art, medieval and early modern devotees regardless of gender, education, and type of religious affiliation (laity, priests, monastics, mendicants, beatas) had their daily lives shaped by apocalyptic expectations and eschatological apprehensions. Scholars have long turned to collaborations to try to address the immense range of what is considered a “theological-literary genre”³ and its impact on beliefs and practices, as no single scholar can address the richness and complexity of contemplation of the endtimes in Christian culture. Beginning with the 1992 volume The Apocalypse in the Middle Ages edited by Emmerson and McGinn, interest in the apocalyptic brought together historians of theology, art, literature, and monotheistic religious culture, while the volume Last Things: Death and the Apocalypse in the Middle Ages edited by Bynum and Freeman that appeared in the millennial moment of 2000 again united scholars across disciplinary boundaries.⁴ In this century, several other major collections have appeared on apocalypticism throughout history that included significant attention to the Middle Ages,⁵ but it wasn’t until 2016 that another volume was devoted to the full era with contributions from multiple fields, A Companion to the Premodern Apocalypse edited by Michael A. Ryan.

It is thus fitting that in this volume dedicated to E. Ann Matter after her retirement, we bring forth a new collection covering many centuries of apocalyptic thought and culture with many different methodological tools, for this reflects Matter’s own extraordinary influence and career. Matter’s essay “The Apocalypse in Early Medieval Exegesis” in the original Apocaylpse in the Middle Ages volume from 1992 remains a classic,⁶ but she is equally well-known for her far-ranging work on textual editions of medieval theologians and early modern visionaries, on biblical exegesis, and on analysis of premodern gender and sexuality. Matter’s students, colleagues, and professors in America and abroad, in contributing the essays assembled here, assume an expansive approach to the problem of the Apocalypse and of Last Things, in recognition of the diverse themes that have defined Matter’s career. They study the Apocalypse and the end of the world as they relate to sacramental theology, biblical exegesis, apocalyptic prophecy, Marian spirituality, patristic thought, and early Christian and Jewish history. Some of our essays look outwards, to inquire after the interactions of apocalyptic thought with broader political, social, and devotional trends; others shed light on the thought and importance of particularly well-known authors from Augustine to Joachim of Fiore to John Donne or bring lesser-known voices to our attention, such as the visionary Juana de la Cruz (1481–1534) or Juan de Horozco y Covarrubias (1540?–1610).

1 Part I: Gendering the Apocalypse

No edited collection to our knowledge brings gender as a lens to bear on the texts and contexts of the apocalyptic. Although there are monographs that specifically examine medieval women’s contribution to and/or consumption of apocalyptic texts and imagery, none of the edited collections listed above thematize gender in medieval apocalyptic (not even in a single essay) or take a female author as their primary topic.⁷ Matter would be the first to query this gap, given her contributions as past president of the Society of Medieval Feminist Scholarship and her extensive scholarship and mentoring on issues of gender and sexuality.⁸ She is the author of several groundbreaking articles on sexuality and mysticism and a discoverer and editor of women’s visionary texts.⁹ She frequently addressed Marian devotion, not only as the culminating discovery of her oft-cited monograph on biblical exegesis, Voice of My Beloved: The Song of Songs in Western Medieval Christianity, but also by reaching beyond the medieval to examine contemporary Marian apocalyptic.¹⁰ In Part I of this collection, “Gendering the Apocalypse,” three scholars examine apocalyptic rhetoric produced through female figures such as the Sibylls, apocalyptic sermons by a female visionary with an intense Marian devotion, and a heavenly Jerusalem on earth whose contours were marked by convents and Marian imagery.

Mary R. D’Angelo evokes Matter’s efforts to revive the memory of female visionaries of the sixteenth and seventeenth with her essay on “The Sobered Sibyl: Gender, Apocalypse and Hair in Dio’s Discourse 1 and the Shepherd of Hermas .” Here D’Angelo compares the character and demeanor of the ancient Sibylls to the “fictive female intermediaries” of Dio Chrysostom’s Discourse 1 and the Shepherd of Hermas . The Sibyl of Cumae from Vergil’s Aeneid , and the Sibyls as imagined in the early empire more broadly, were ancient oracles with unkempt hair who delivered prophecies in moments of possessed fury, while the intermediaries in Dio and Hermas are staid and restrained prophets despite deliberate Sibylline parallels. D’Angelo detects behind the sobered Sibylline characters of Dio and Hermas a new interest in and demand for reason and restraint in prophetesses of the second century, which amounts to a rejection of the Platonic equation of the mantic arts with mania. The shift is intertwined with other historical forces, including renewed secular interest in female probity and restraint in Roman society at the turn of the second century; broader discourses surrounding the New Prophets or Montanists, for whom prophecy involved the displacement of human reason; and the value that Paul placed, in 1 Corinthians, on prophecy spoken with the cooperation of mental faculties, rather than in the absence of them.

In “The Marian Apocalyptic of a Visionary Preacher: The Conorte of Juana de la Cruz, 1481-1534,” Jessica A. Boon proceeds from Matter’s typology of twentieth-century Marian apparitions, especially Matter’s identification of a shift towards apocalyptic messages following the Fatima apparitions in the 1920s. Political turmoil and the realignment that Catholic observance experienced after Vatican II inspired this growing apocalyptic focus of worldwide Marian apparitions.¹¹ Boon finds similar forces in play in Spain around 1500. The early years of the Spanish empire were another era of global crisis and political anxiety, and they too witnessed a new abundance of Marian apparitions and an intensive preoccupation with apocalyptic themes. For her case study, Boon turns to Juana de la Cruz, an abbess of a Clarisan convent near Toledo who channeled the voice of Jesus and who was, like the visionaries Matter has studied, a “living saint.”¹² Juana’s visions, as set forth in public sermons, came to be assembled in a manuscript known as her Book of Consolation (El libro del conorte). They include frequent discussions of the endtimes, and they emphasize the agency of the Virgin Mary, who rescues souls from Purgatory and even vanquishes and binds the devil. Boon concludes that this “Marian Apocalyptic” aligned with a broader prophetic and apocalyptic mentality at work in the early Spanish empire. Specifically, Boon shows that Mary in her apocalyptic aspect must have spoken deeply to the Spanish faithful, whose devotion t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• Part I. Gendering the Apocalypse
• Part II. Apocalyptic Theology and Exegesis
• Part III. The Eschaton in Political, Liturgical, and Literary Contexts
• Back Matter